I've never told anyone this story, and never thought I would -- not
because I was afraid of being disbelieved, exactly, but because I was
ashamed...and because it was mine. I've always felt that telling
it would cheapen both me and the story itself, make it smaller and more
mundane, no more than a camp counselor's ghost story told before
lights-out. I think I was also afraid that if I told it, heard it with
my own ears, I might start to disbelieve it myself. But since my mother
died I haven't been able to sleep very well. I doze off and then snap
back again, wide awake and shivering. Leaving the bedside lamp on helps,
but not as much as you might think. There are so many more shadows at
night, have you ever noticed that? Even with a light on there are so
many shadows. The long ones could be the shadows of anything, you think.
Anything at all.
I was a junior at the University of Maine
when Mrs. McCurdy called about ma. My father died when I was too young
to remember him and I was an only child, so it was just Alan and Jean
Parker against the world. Mrs. McCurdy, who lived just up the road,
called at the apartment I shared with three other guys. She had gotten
the number off the magnetic minder-board ma kept on her fridge.
"'Twas a stroke," she said in
that long and drawling Yankee accent of hers. "Happened at the
restaurant. But don't you go flyin off all half-cocked. Doctor says it
wa'ant too bad. She's awake and she's talkin."
"Yeah, but is she making sense?"
I asked. I was trying to sound calm, even amused, but my heart was
beating fast and the living room suddenly felt too warm. I had the
apartment all to myself; it was Wednesday, and both my roomies had
classes all day.
"Oh, ayuh. First thing she said was
for me to call you but not to scare you. That's pretty sensible,
wouldn't you say?"
"Yeah." But of course I was
scared. When someone calls and tells you your mother's been taken from
work to the hospital in an ambulance, how else are you supposed to feel?
"She said for you to stay right there
and mind your schoolin until the weekend. She said you could come then,
if you didn't have too much studyin t'do."
Sure, I thought. Fat chance. I'd just stay
here in this ratty, beer-smelling apartment while my mother lay in a
hospital bed a hundred miles south, maybe dying.
"She's still a young woman, your
ma," Mrs. McCurdy said. "It's just that she's let herself get
awful heavy these last few years, and she's got the hypertension. Plus
the cigarettes. She's goin to have to give up the smokes."
I doubted if she would, though, stroke or
no stroke, and about that I was right -- my mother loved her smokes. I
thanked Mrs. McCurdy for calling.
"First thing I did when I got
home," she said. "So when are you coming, Alan? Sad'dy?"
There was a sly note in her voice that suggested she knew better.
I looked out the window at a perfect
afternoon in October: bright blue New England sky over trees that were
shaking down their yellow leaves onto Mill Street. Then I glanced at my
watch. Twenty past three. I'd just been on my way out to my four o'clock
philosophy seminar when the phone rang.
"You kidding?" I asked.
"I'll be there tonight."
Her laughter was dry and a little cracked
around the edges -- Mrs. McCurdy was a great one to talk about giving up
the cigarettes, her and her Winstons. "Good boy! You'll go straight
to the hospital, won't you, then drive out to the house?"
"I guess so, yeah," I said. I
saw no sense in telling Mrs. McCurdy that there was something wrong with
the transmission of my old car, and it wasn't going anywhere but the
driveway for the foreseeable future. I'd hitchhike down to Lewiston,
then out to our little house in Harlow if it wasn't too late. If it was,
I'd snooze in one of the hospital lounges. It wouldn't be the first time
I'd ridden my thumb home from school. Or slept sitting up with my head
leaning against a Coke machine, for that matter.
"I'll make sure the key's under the
red wheelbarrow," she said. "You know where I mean, don't
you?"
"Sure." My mother kept an old
red wheelbarrow by the door to the back shed; in the summer it foamed
with flowers. Thinking of it for some reason brought Mrs. McCurdy's news
home to me as a true fact: my mother was in the hospital, the little
house in Harlow where I'd grown up was going to be dark tonight -- there
was no one there to turn on the lights after the sun went down. Mrs.
McCurdy could say she was young, but when you're just twenty-one
yourself, forty-eight seems ancient.
"Be careful, Alan. Don't speed."
My speed, of course, would be up to
whoever I hooked a ride with, and I personally hoped that whoever it was
would go like hell. As far as I was concerned, I couldn't get to Central
Maine Medical Center fast enough. Still, there was no sense worrying
Mrs. McCurdy.
"I won't. Thanks."
"Welcome," she said. "Your
ma's going to be just fine. And won't she be some happy to see
you."
I hung up, then scribbled a note saying
what had happened and where I was going. I asked Hector Passmore, the
more responsible of my roommates, to call my adviser and ask him to tell
my instructors what was up so I wouldn't get whacked for cutting -- two
or three of my teachers were real bears about that. Then I stuffed a
change of clothes into my backpack, added my dog-eared copy of Introduction
to Philosophy, and headed out. I dropped the course the following
week, although I had been doing quite well in it. The way I looked at
the world changed that night, changed quite a lot, and nothing in my
philosophy textbook seemed to fit the changes. I came to understand that
there are things underneath, you see -- underneath -- and no book
can explain what they are. I think that sometimes it's best to just
forget those things are there. If you can, that is.
New
& Notable
